Invoices in a foreign currency: which amount belongs in the return

01The mistake almost everyone makes

Software works in minor units: cents, not euros. The amount of an invoice for twenty dollars looks exactly like the amount of an invoice for twenty euros. The currency sits in a column beside it — and gets forgotten when things are added up.

We found exactly this in our own records: dollar amounts went into the return as euros. The figures looked precise, and they were — just not in euros.

It does not show. A total mixing currencies is a perfectly tidy number with two decimals; nothing about it looks wrong. It would only surface in an audit, and then retrospectively for every quarter already filed.

02What you enter: the amount that was actually taken

If the invoice is in dollars and the bank took a euro amount for it, the amount taken is what you actually spent. It is a fact — evidenced by the statement, checkable, dated.

An exchange rate is not a fact but a rule: which rate applies on which day for a tax return is a matter of tax law, not of software. Pick the rate yourself and you have guessed.

So Invobookz does not convert. It takes the bank line where there is one, asks for the amount where there is not — and keeps the return blocked while the figure is missing. A guessed figure would go to the authority as a file.

03How net and tax are split

The rate changes the amount, not the composition. What was four fifths net and one fifth tax on the invoice is still that in euros. One gross figure is therefore enough — a second field for the tax would be a second route to the same number and would drift apart in time.

The calculation runs through the tax, not the net: the tax is the figure the authority recalculates, so it takes the rounding. The net is the remainder. The other way round the total would still add up, but the cent would sit in the wrong line.

Under the reverse charge this disappears entirely: no tax is shown, so the whole amount is net.

04Three cases where there is no bank line

A missing link looks like carelessness. Usually it is a fact about the transaction:

• Paid privately and reimbursed as a lump sum. The company account then knows only the total, never the single invoice — only the private statement helps here.
• Paid through an account that was later closed. The amount is then no longer establishable, and that is a result: the figure is unknown, not nil.
• From a year for which no bank movements have been imported yet.

A message offering the reader a route that does not exist for their case costs them one attempt and after that their trust. So Invobookz asks first why the line is missing.

05What else the statement leaves out

The bank’s rate applies without the bank’s fee. Divide the full amount taken by the rate quoted and you will not arrive at the invoice amount — the difference is the bank’s charge, and in the CAMT format it even has a field of its own.

And two debits against one invoice do not mean “twice as much” but “not decided”: it may be an instalment or a mismatch. Either way it is open which amount corresponds to the invoice.